Right royal regency tale that has it all

princesses: the six daughters of george iii by flora fraser(john murray, (pounds) 25) Where is Andrew Davies when you need him? If ever there was a book crying out for the BBC costume department and for Davies's adaptation skills, this is it. For Flora Fraser has given us a real-life Regency tale , full of cads, bounders, elopements, affairs, madness, illegitimate offspring, tragedies and comedies, all within a scholarly tome that simultaneously manages to pay due reverence to a hugely influential royal family.

Strictly speaking, this is also a pre-Regency tale, as we begin with the birth of the first of the six princesses, the princess royal, in 1766, 10 years before the American Declaration of Independence, which was to mark George III's reign publicly, and 22 years before the onset of the madness which was to mark it privately.

Christened Charlotte after George's German wife, but always known as Royal, she was the stately eldest daughter who adored her father and loathed her mother. The sometimes "erratic" Augusta followed two years later, then came bookish, clever Elizabeth in 1770. Mary, the acknowledged beauty of the family, arrived in 1776, followed by Sophia a year later, the most scandalous sister of them all. She would produce an illegitimate child and also be the subject of unsavoury gossip alleging an affair with her brutish elder brother, Ernest. Then, lastly, came Amelia in 1783, the baby of the family, who was to die of tuberculosis at the early age of 27 after a secret love affair and the contraction of a sexually-transmitted disease.

The sisters' education was surprisingly advanced for women of that time, as their mother rather radically thought that "women with a good education would be capable of as much as men". The Queen also worried that the private world in which the girls were brought up at Windsor was too sheltering and did not prepare them properly for the dynastic marriages they would be expected to make.

Except that George III did not want his daughters making any marriages at all. Fraser rightly points out that George III was lambasted during his reign as "Farmer George", who took his eye off affairs of state with disastrous consequences for his kingdom. But she also portrays him as a loving, gentle father. He nevertheless remains, in this account at least, the sole architect of any misery that befell his daughters. Even when offers of marriage were made which they were keen to accept, he refused to allow them to marry. Royal did not marry until she was 31, and only two sisters followed her course, marrying either relatives or more distant German princes. None of the sisters produced any legitimate children - it was rumoured that Elizabeth produced two, but unlike Sophia's illegitimate son, this was never proved.

None of them, however, blamed their father for their fates, choosing to focus their ire on their mother. The sisters found support in each other and Fraser quotes from the many letters between them in later life which are touching in their frankness.

But this is not just an entertaining tale of six sisters, it is also a warning tale about the dynastic importance of royal offspring. Here, in this account of a royal family of six daughters and seven sons, we see the template for Queen Victoria's bequest to the future - nine offspring. And we all know what that led to.

Copyright 2004 SMG Sunday Newspapers Ltd.
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